FT259

We’ve been writing this monthly column now for nearly seven years, bringing you the latest news, speculation and theor­ies from the wilder shores of ufology. And in all that time you never once had us sussed as MI5 agents, did you? But our cover has been blown and it’s our duty to tell you all – or at least to show you the levels of intellect­ual bankruptcy which underpin the subject. In early December 2009 a ‘D’ list British UFO buff by the name of Richard Hall ran a feature on his website called “MI5 Exposed”. Beneath the headline Hall ‘revealed’ how several leading ufologists, many connected to the “MI5 infiltrated Fortean Times” (!) were responsible for leading the subject astray. Filmmaker and crop circle creator John Lundberg was fingered as being one agent, his masters apparently having provided him with free accommodat­ion in London since 1995 and paid for him to travel the world on his filming trips. Lundberg’s partner in crime is none other than FT-contributor Mark Pilkington, who Hall claims has travelled to America on MI5’s payroll, “preying on unsuspecting ufologists who unwittingly agreed to be debunked on camera”. If Hall is paranoid about Pilkington and Lundberg now, just wait until he reads Mark’s new book The Mirage Men. He’ll need a long lie down in a darkened room after that!

And, of course, your humble columnists are on the list too. Why? Well, according to Hall, Roberts must be on MI5’s books, because why else would he have spent so much time, energy and money on the Berwyn Mountain UFO crash only to ‘prove’ it was all misper­ception and rumour? Clearly, in the minds of these paranoid fantasists the only reason to invest time in ufology is if you believe that ‘They’ are here. The sinister David Clarke, meanwhile, can only be working for MI5 because every time the UK government releases new UFO files he is the only expert quoted by the media (which must be news to Nick Pope). Well, der! That would be because Mr Clarke is the consultant to The National Archives for the whole project, a position he has earned from a decade of hard work persuading the MoD to release the files in the first place – facts which Hall clearly doesn’t know about and, if he did, would probably only feel that this would implicate Clarke even further in the hall of mirrors he believes to be the truth.

Needless to say, we and our other MI5 coll­eagues laughed ourselves silly at this website. Of course, it’s axiomatic that if you haven’t been suspected of working for the government you aren’t doing your job as a ufologist. But while Hall’s site is proof positive that our collective efforts have had a real and lasting impact on the subject, it also represents all that is utterly redundant about the subject. It’s bad enough that people believe, usually on the strength of what they glean from the Internet, that aliens are visiting Earth and that there is a worldwide conspiracy to keep this covered up. But when ufo­logists start to believe – really believe, as these people do – that the subject is riddled with intelligence agents, then something is deeply wrong and ufology is developing a cancer at its core. And it’s these cancers of belief which would surely allow intelli­gence agencies, should they ever want to, to manipulate ufo­logy for their own ends. As that old and sadly missed fortean Robert Anton Wilson once said: “Belief is the death of intelli­gence.”